Sometimes Gardens Are too Big

Do you sometimes feel like your garden is too big?  There just seems a lot to do.

This idea of too much hits me now in May when I am working in the garden to clean up from winter, weed, transplant, and fill pots for the summer.

I have built my garden over the past twenty-five years, a bit at a time.

Rochester seedsman James Vick (1818-1882) once raised the same question.

He wrote in his seed catalog of 1872: “The great difficulty with American gardens is that they are too large, and not sufficiently cared for.  If we gave the same amount of labor on a quarter of an acre that we now expend on an acre, the result would be much more satisfactory.”

Vick recognized that a gardener needs a sense of satisfaction in the work of gardening.  One way to achieve that is to have less to cultivate.

Somehow I feel Vick’s insight is just as appropriate for a gardener today as it was in the 1880s.